How we do the Daily Scrum in my team

In a typical Daily Scrum, every team answers the three questions about what was done, what is next and which impediments there are.

We moved away from this form of Daily Scrum because it is not very efficient and not focused on Sprint Backlog items. It’s not efficient because we do a lot of pair programming and several team members work on the same User Story at once. Therefore, some team members could only say “I did the same as already said”. This way of doing the Daily Scrum makes it hard to plan the next 24 hours as a team, too. Planning the next day is a team task and cannot be answered by a single team member for him- or herself.

So, what do we do then?

In our Daily Scrum, we stand in front of our (physical) Scrum Board and make a wipe from top to bottom through all User Stories and other Sprint Backlog items on the board.

At the top, there are of course some already finished Items after some time into the Sprint. We skip these, unless we got feedback about them from our Product Owner, or anybody else trying the product by grabbing the latest version from our continuous integration environment.

Then, there are the Items we are currently working on. For every Item, an involved developer tells everyone what was newly built, which problems arose, how these problems were solved and open issues. Other developers add their insights or ask questions. If the Item is not yet finished, the developers discuss what to do next and who will do it.

And then, there are the not yet started Items. We check whether someone should do some preparation work so that we don’t get into situations where developers are blocked. This can happen when there is not enough work that can be done in parallel. This look into the future helps us to keep a high pace throughout the whole Sprint.

Finally, we talk about things not directly related to the Sprint Backlog items, like the crashed build agent, the new version of some tool or where to go for lunch 😉

This form of Daily Scrum helped us to get rid of the inefficiencies of the round robin and to plan the next 24 hours more easily (okay we normally just work 8 hours a day).